Every so often an academic controversy spills out into the public arena and becomes an urgent matter of concern. One thinks of CP Snow and FR Leavis and the two cultures, or Stephen Hawking and the mind of God. It is healthy that this should happen; too often the arts and sciences are removed from the real issues of life.
TS Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form by Anthony Julius is an abstruse work of literary criticism; it would have gone unnoticed if it had not so painfully exposed the dividing line between art and morality. Eliot is regarded as the greatest poet of our century. Most casual readers of poetry imagine great poets to be champions of decency and humane values. Less casual readers have long been aware that Eliot was a reactionary, whose thinking includes what appears to be anti-Semitism. However, the literary outlook that prevailed in his day has for the most part kept him above criticism. The language of poetry, we used to be told, is not like other language. It is "non-propositional." So if Eliot's Burbank with a Baedeker says offensive things about Jews, no one need feel offended. The utterance is a dramatic one and, if the poem is any good, it will be undermined or modified by irony. If it is not so undermined, the language has become propositional and the poem is a bad one.
There has always been unease in the literary world at the disgust expressed by Eliot in his description of Jews, but even that could be deflected. The Jew in Gerontion is a symbolic figure: he stands for something else, so Eliot's disgust is directed at something else.
To the extent that recent criticism exposes such evident cant, I am in favour of it. To the extent that it damages the imaginative range of poetry, I am against it-especially when the act of critical analysis becomes the excuse for a witch-hunt. The Julius book has inspired an impressive public response and sides have been taken by important poets: Craig Raine, Tom Paulin and James Fenton. Some of these articles have been scrupulously cautious in their judgements, but there have also been blatant instances of coat-trailing self-advertisement.
Julius's thesis, complex though it is, may be simply summarised. Anti-Semitism, far from being an occasional blemish on Eliot's poetry, is central to it: a theme, a motive force, even a poetic method. There is no necessary connection between poetic talent and moral good. A good poet may use his skill to promote evil, as Eliot (in Julius's judgement) does. Since Eliot's poems are effective, his anti-Semitism must be regarded as a strength rather than a weakness. This last point includes an element of bad faith. Julius believes, as I do, that language cannot help being propositional, whether in verse or prose. In persuading us to accept the strength of Eliot's anti-Semitism, he is in effect asking us to admire poetry whose propositions are evil. But in fact Julius, like many modern critics, has set himself up as a kind of moral policeman who is more anxious to catch Eliot red-handed than to advocate the greatness of his art. In the event I think he misses the truth about Eliot, which I suspect is as simple and as complex as human nature itself. Like most of us, Eliot lived a contradiction.
Be that as it may, the weight Julius gives to the problem is hardly balanced by its prominence in Eliot's poetry. It dominates his second book of verse, Ara Vos Prec, published in 1920, then virtually disappears, resurfacing briefly in prose writing later on. Eliot does seem to have been preoccupied with Jews and Judaism, and not always in a spirit of antagonism. Eight years after Ara Vos Prec, he was received into the Church of England. He had prepared for his conversion over many years and was conscious of Christianity as a Judaic religion in origin. Indeed, it could be argued that the need to distinguish between the two religions is precisely the source of the animus informing Ara Vos Prec. (As the Hebrew scholar Hyam Maccoby has argued in the TLS, the issue is more theological than racial.)
This seems to me especially true of the only major poem to seem infected: Gerontion. The chapter on this poem is 33 pages long and includes some spectacular criticism, of which Julius may justly be proud. In the end, though, I think he misjudges the poem. The key lines are:
My house is a decayed house,
And the jew squats on the
window-sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
Eight pages are devoted to these lines and the two that follow them. Julius opens up the sewer of anti-Semitic literature to amplify each word, indeed each phoneme, concluding with admiration for Eliot's powers of compression. This strikes me as disingenuous since it entails judging Eliot for things other people have said and which cannot be proved to have anything to do with him. Julius is a lawyer by profession. If I were a judge, I would rule that most of these pages are inadmissible evidence. Furthermore, Gerontion is a dramatic monologue; it is meant to be spoken by an imagined persona, not the poet. In one of his most brilliant passages, Julius shows how our expectations of monologue are systematically frustrated by the poet, so that verisimilitude is undermined. But this cannot alter the fact that the poem is ascribed to a speaker who clearly cannot be Eliot.
But the weakest link in Julius's chain is his failure to consider the symbolism embedded in these lines. The rented house stands for at least two things. It is the temporary lodging of the human mind-the body-which the old man is soon to relinquish; and then it is Europe, the home of our civilisation. Eliot in his criticism talks a great deal about "the mind of Europe" and he does so in a spirit of anxiety. You can see why from the poems; the house is always decaying. The jew-lower case in the original text, upgraded to Jew soon after the war-is there to imply, as Julius says, that our culture is in hock to commercial interests that have no roots or loyalties. This is undeniably anti-Semitic, though it is not only anti-Semitic. But he is also there to suggest that Christian culture is neither pure nor autonomous but derivative. Christianity is a Judaic religion, Jesus was a Jew. If the Jew now seems disgraced and repellent, it is because Christians have made him so. Indeed, the Jew is in this case a jew in the cant sense of the word: a tight-fisted money-grubber, regardless of ethnic origin. This may seem offensive now, and always was, but before the Holocaust it was commonplace, even among the otherwise enlightened.
Moreover, as Julius points out but then seems to forget, Eliot is no nicer to his Christian, the poem's persona, whose impermanence and sterility make him an alter ego to the rootless cosmopolitan of anti-Semitic euphemism. This is related to the persistent theme of deracination in Eliot's work and probably to his own anxiety to belong. He was, after all, an American who made himself more English than the English, and we need go no further than the beginning of The Waste Land to see that he was preoccupied with rootless cosmopolitans even when they were not Jews: "Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch" (I'm not Russian at all, I come from Lithuania, pure German). The Jew, then, is both a type of modern man and the degraded heir of the great religion to which our culture owes its existence. In some sense the poem (as opposed to its speaker) honours the Jew and feels compassion for him.
I am not saying that this renders the lines I have quoted inoffensive. Eliot's assumption that a class of person can be made to stand for these issues is racist. But there are racists and racists. Not all of them believe in final solutions. What Julius refuses to recognise is the routine anti-Semitism of the pre-Holocaust era. Take Graham Greene, hardly a right wing fanatic. In his novel Brighton Rock, published as late as 1938, the mobsters who control the Brighton underworld are Jewish, their behaviour and physical features described with Eliotesque repugnance. Then around 1960 all this changed. No revised edition was officially published, but Jews were transformed overnight into Italian mafiosi.
I have never understood why prejudice against nations that have suffered persecution is thought shameful when the same prejudice against other nations is not. In any case, what the Greene story shows is that, before the Holocaust made it unthinkable, anti-Semitism was a conventional prejudice to which few gentiles gave much thought. Indeed Greene, Eliot and Eliot's more strident friend Ezra Pound, associated anti-Semitism with virtue, for the Jews were thought to be involved in the economic corruption of society. In the shadow of the Holocaust, however, a man like Greene feels obliged to amend the record, much as Eliot silently altered jew to Jew.
Conscious of the evil done to the Jews, non-Jewish Europeans have come to realise that their civilisation is rooted in anti-Semitism. In the middle ages, Christendom defined itself by opposition to the Semites on its borders. As it challenged the Muslims in the crusades, it also expelled or persecuted the Jews. It found justification for this in what is otherwise the most contemplative of the synoptic gospels, that of St John. Anti-Semitism, as a result, remains an atavistic prejudice that we cannot wholly escape, though we may modify it by the exercise of reason. The anger felt by Julius, who is Jewish, is understandable, even if his sometimes excellent book is unbalanced and unjust. What really troubles me in this debate is the way some critics reflect in their behaviour the very reaction they seem to be attacking. Tom Paulin's assault on Eliot in the LRB reeks of a self-righteousness that plainly derives from feelings of cultural guilt. Anxious to still our disquieting inner voices, we hunt down the giants our culture once revered. In doing so, we make scapegoats of them.
TS Eliot, anti-semitism and literary form
Anthony Julius
